In the field of videoconferencing or videophony, users do not generally wish to show an image of their intimate environment by using an image capture device such as a camera or a web camera (“webcam”). This reticence of users may constitute a psychological brake to the use of home videophony.
Moreover, in the field of radiocommunications, document EP 1 847 958 discloses a mobile terminal equipped with two miniature cameras which allows its user to transmit to another user, possessing a mobile terminal, a videophone message including an image composed essentially of a useful part corresponding for example to the user's silhouette or face. The information throughput required for the transmission of the message through the network is thus reduced since only the useful image part is transmitted, the remainder of the image, corresponding for example to the setting in which the user is situated, being deleted by appropriate processing.
A drawback of the aforesaid mobile terminal resides in the fact that the image restored on the mobile terminal of the opposite party exhibits a low resolution, the screen of a mobile terminal exhibiting a reduced size.
In the prior art, there also exist infrared sensor-based systems which use projections of electromagnetic waves in the infrared in a particular scene and analyse the projected waves so as to distinguish between people and objects.
However, these systems require a complex and expensive installation which turns out to be unsuited to applications such as videoconferencing. Furthermore, such systems exhibit the drawback of generating a relatively significant snapshot latency time which is caused by the reinitialization of the infrared sensor after each image capture. Finally, the definition of the image obtained by such systems is relatively mediocre.